Review

Reviewed Work(s): Doing Difference by Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker

Review by: Patricia Hill Collins, Lionel A. Maldonado, Dana Y. Takagi, Barrie Thorne, Lynn
Weber and Howard Winant
Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Aug., 1995), pp. 491-506
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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 SYMPOSIUM
On West and Fenstermaker's
"Doing Difference"

PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

LIONEL A. MALDONADO
DANA Y TAKAGI
BARRIE THORNE
LYNN WEBER
HOWARD WINANT

PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

University of Cincinnati

How wonderful it would be to possess the insight to see beyond the me

contemporary politics of race, class, and gender in order to propose "a new wa
thinking about the workings of these relations" (West and Fenstermaker 1995
The area of race, class, gender studies struggles with the complex question of
to think about intersections of systems of oppression of race, class, and gender
clearly need new models that will assist us in seeing how structures of pow
organized around intersecting relations of race, class, and gender frame the s
positions occupied by individuals; work explaining how interlocking system
oppression produce social locations for us all, where Black men are routi
stopped by the police for no apparent reason, or African American women
Patricia Williams are denied entry to stores where they could spend their h
earned law professor salaries.
Despite West and Fenstermaker's initial promises to retheorize the intersect
of race, class, and gender in a way that transcends the limitations of existing mo
a surprising thing happened on the way to the end of their article. One by one, r
gender, and even class were erased. As a result, an article that claims to rethe
the interconnections of race, class, and gender said remarkably little about rac
patriarchy, and capitalism as systems of power. How this happened was impres
Race and class appeared as gender in drag, each arriving in analytical fo
virtually unrecognizable to practitioners of these respective fields. Each made
appearances, before returning to the safe haven of social constructionist argum

REPRINT REQUESTS: Patricia Hill Collins, Dept. of African-American Studies, ML370, Unive
of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 9 No. 4, August 1995 491-513

? 1995 Sociologists for Women in Society
491

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492 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

about difference. In the place of the race, class, and gender came a rehashing of
social constructionist views of society, a technique of ethnomethodology masquer-
ading as new theory, and-most amazing-the concept of difference used as proxy
for the interconnectedness of race, class, and gender itself. The very things the
article claimed to reveal it curiously erased, all the while talking about them.
Perhaps articles like "Doing Difference" wouldn't bother me so much if the
stakes weren't so high. Since I have long worked in the field of race, class, and
gender studies, a quick summary of the field provides a context for evaluating the
contributions of this article. For years, scholars in the separate areas of race or class
or gender struggled for the primacy of each as an analytical category explaining
inequality. To do this, they diligently chipped away at a social science logic that
constructed race, class, and gender as benign attributes that were useful for
describing human subjects in research designs, but treated racism, sexism, and class
exploitation as variations of other more fundamental processes. More important,
race, class, and gender studies each emerged, not in the rarefied atmosphere of
academia, but in conjunction with social movements populated by people who had
a real stake in understanding and changing inequalities of power resulting from
systems of oppression called racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation.
These links between theory and politics meant that, despite their historical
differences, all three areas shared certain fundamentals. Each aimed to explain the
links between micro level experiences structured along axes of race, class, and
gender, with the larger, overarching macro systems. Each reasoned that, if individu-
als could link their own experiences with oppression on a micro level with the larger
macro forces constructing their social position, they could address some of the
major social problems of our day.
This commitment to theorizing oppression via these distinctive emphases even-
tually encountered the limitations of privileging any one system of oppression over
others-of patriarchy over class, for example, or white supremacy over homopho-
bia. The very notion of the intersections of race, class, gender as an area worthy of
study emerged from the recognition of practitioners of each distinctive theoretical
tradition that inequality could not be explained, let alone challenged, via a race-
only, class-only, or gender-only framework. No one had all the answers and no one
was going to get all of the answers without attention to two things. First, the notion
of interlocking oppressions refers to the macro level connections linking systems
of oppression such as race, class, and gender. This is the model describing the social
structures that create social positions. Second, the notion of intersectionality
describes micro level processes-namely, how each individual and group occupies
a social position within interlocking structures of oppression described by the
metaphor of intersectionality. Together they shape oppression.
At this historical moment we have something very momentous
happening-the linking of three historically distinct areas of inquiry with
renewed commitment to theorize connections on multiple levels of social structu
To accomplish this goal, all must support a working hypothesis of equivalency
between oppressions that allows us to explore the interconnections amon
the systems and extract us from the internecine battles of whose oppression

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 SYMPOSIUM 493

is more fundamental. The intent of race, class, gender studi

understand oppression (or in the more polite language of academi
"stratification.")
"Doing Difference" claims the language of inclusivity, but dec
from the history of race, class, gender studies. It strips the very ca
class, and gender of meaning and then recasts the problems of instituti
apolitical framework of how we might "do difference."
The authors achieve this intellectual sleight of hand impressive
order in which they construct the individual discussions of gende
Despite criticizing others who use "additive" approaches, in cons
argument, the authors use this same approach of treating gend
fundamental, theoretical category and then "adding" on race an
out their theoretical argument within a gender-only framework and
this argument to race and class. Note that there are no "experience"
the gender category; apparently gender speaks for itself and need
contrast, the discussion of race has more "experiences" included
the unintended but nonetheless unfortunate outcome of constructin
as less theoretical and more embodied. Amazingly, the discussion
opens with an "experience," foreshadowing an unusual approach
Their treatment of social class remains distinctive because the literature of social
class, much more so than that of gender and race, has long been grounded in
questions of institutional power. After all, it is hard to discuss global capitalist
markets as performances and representations.
By the end of the article, I found little evidence that the authors had really
proposed a new way of thinking. Instead, they managed to transform the interlock-
ing systems of oppression of race, class, and gender that produce positions charac-
terized by intersectionality into, as British cultural critic Stuart Hall puts it, "a
difference that didn't make any difference at all" (1992, 23).
To recast race, class, gender politics as an issue of postmodernist difference is
indicative of some problems of the politics of postmodernist discourse overall. The
construct of difference emerges from social constructionist views of self/other
where the self is constructed against the difference of the other, but this is not the
use of difference we encounter in this article. Social institutions, especially analyses
of the institutional bases of power shaping race, class, and gender, are dropped from
the analysis, leaving a plethora of postmodernist representations in their wake.
Recasting racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation solely in social constructionist
terms reduces race, class, and gender to performances, interactions between people
embedded in a never ending string of equivalent relations, all containing race, class,
and gender in some form, but a chain of equivalences devoid of power relations.
This all leads to the puzzling question of why this is happening. It is one thing
to say that manipulating "difference" comprises one effective tactic used by
dominant groups to maintain control-this insight is closer to the actual meanings
of Williams, Spelman, and myself. It's quite another to wring one's hands about the
"problem of difference," laying the groundwork for handling difference as the real
problem, instead of the power relations that construct difference.

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494 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

Since not all social groups appear to find difference to be such a meaningful
concept, I'm left wondering who is worried about it? Thinking through the meaning
of difference hasn't much concerned people of color, poor people, and all the other
people deemed "different" who disappear from this article. Attention by oppressed
groups to the meaning of difference remains firmly rooted in the question of the
use to which differences are put in defending unequal power arrangements.
Despite the well-intentioned goal of the authors, "Doing Difference" and similar
efforts to infuse race, class, and gender studies with postmodernist notions of
difference leave us on dangerously thin ice. What type of oppositional politics
emerge from a focus on difference devoid of power? What types of directions
emerge from theories stressing representations over institutional structures and
social policies as central to race, class, and gender relations? Already, I see far too
many students who see resistance to oppression as occurring only in the area of
representation, as if thinking about resistance and analyzing representations can
substitute for active resistance against institutional power. Quite simply, difference
is less a problem for me than racism, class exploitation, and gender oppression.
Conceptualizing these systems of oppression as difference obfuscates the power
relations and material inequalities that constitute oppression. Doing away with
thinking about difference will clarify the real problem.

REFERENCES

Hall, Stuart. 1992. What is this "Black" in Black popular culture? In Black popular culture
Gina Dent and Michele Wallace. Seattle: Bay Press.
West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society 9:8-37.

Patricia Hill Collins is Professor of African-American Studies and Sociology at the Uni
of Cincinnati. She is the author of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness
Politics of Empowerment and the editor with Margaret Andersen of Race, Class, Gend
Anthology.

LIONEL A. MALDONADO
California State University, San Marcos

West and Fenstermaker's (1995) argument is engaging and provocative. Th

propose extending the use of an ethnomethodological formulation for under-
standing gender to also include race and class factors. They argue that the
approach is a way to understand the social construction of gender, race, and clas
and contend that the common distinction between "micro" and "macro" levels o

REPRINT REQUESTS: LionelA. Maldonado, Liberal Studies, California State University, San Marco
San Marcos, CA 92069.

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 SYMPOSIUM 495

analysis is a false distinction. This point is made in their discussion of

ing" race, but presumably is extended to gender and class. They imp
formulation is sufficient to understand the processes regarding soci
generally, but their argument is not entirely convincing. There are t
I believe need to be addressed more fully regarding their social construc
class, and gender-the focus on both social and construction.
First, on the social part of this construction. I agree that people ma
history. They do so, however, within the confines of the circu
conditions they encounter. For example, Michael Mann (1993) has d
how military, political, and economic conditions of different periods
nation-state and influence the experiences of individuals and groups.
context, socially constructed definitions, interpretations, and their
produced. The formulation by West and Fenstermaker shifts our att
these historical circumstances. The authors' position would be strength
formally acknowledging the constraints imposed by these macro level
social environment.
My second point is that since reality is constructed, we need to be clear whose
construction is being given attention. West and Fenstermaker's discussion leaves
the impression that reality somehow is monolithic. They do this in spite of an early
acknowledgment that the feminist movement did not address the needs and condi-
tions of working-class women and women of color, nor did it recruit them; this
rendered the movement less than inclusive. Clearly, groups and their members can,
and often do, have very different (even diametrically opposed) beliefs about what
is "real," "objectively true," "good," and "desirable." Much of this depends on the
place each occupies in the social structure. How West and Fenstermaker's concep-
tion would accommodate this lack of consensus on social construction is not clear.
Good examples on whose ideology wins out in this battle include Andrew Scull
(1993) on the treatment of lunacy in Great Britain, George Sanchez (1993) on the
development of the Chicano community in Los Angeles, and Paula Giddings (1984)
on why Black women were not drawn to the feminist movement of white, middle-
class women. West and Fenstermaker's argument would be enriched by considera-
tion of such works.

REFERENCES

Giddings, Paula. 1984. When and where I enter: The impact of Black women on race and
New York: Bantam Books.

Mann, Michael. 1993. The sources of social power-Vol. II. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sanchez, George. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, culture, and identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scull, Andrew. 1993. The most solitary of afflictions: Madness and society in Britain, 1700-1900. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society 9:8-37.

Lionel A. Maldonado teaches courses on race/ethnic identity in American society and on the
development and perpetration of ethnic/racial stratification in the United States. He has also

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496 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

done research on the Chicano community in America. Before joining the faculty at California
State University, San Marcos, he was deputy executive officer of the American Sociological
Association and director of its Minority Affairs Program.

DANA Y TAKAGI
University of California, Santa Cruz

In The Ethics of Authenticity, a pithy book about identity, politics, and modernity,
philosopher Charles Taylor (1992) defines three grand malaises of modernity: loss
of meaning, loss of ends, and loss of freedoms. Taylor admits these are jumbo-sized
themes, and he restricts his discussion to the first malaise-loss of meaning-
hoping that others will be persuaded by his analysis and encouraged to take up
analysis of the remaining two. Taylor's point is a simple one; namely, that contem-
porary debates about modernity fail to get to the heart of the problem-an analysis
of the moral weightiness of the ideal of authenticity. Indeed, according to Taylor
(1992), in spite of the tremendous amount of disagreement between, for example,
universalists and relativists, the discussion in toto reveals an "extraordinary inarticu-
lacy" about authenticity, as "one of the constitutive ideals of modern culture"
(p. 18).
Like Taylor, West and Fenstermaker are interested in grand malaise. Although
they never invoke his discussion, the parallel between their essay and Taylor's book
is striking. As if on cue, they pick up Taylor's second grand malaise, "loss of ends,"
and illustrate how some feminist technologies of understanding race, class, and
gender, are animated by mathematical metaphors-intersections, additivity, and
overlapping circles of Venn diagrams. By "loss of ends," Taylor is referring to the
"primacy of instrumental reason" in economic, social, and political life. For West
and Fenstermaker, arithmetic models, although providing neat diagrams of inter-
sectionality, tend to ignore the socially produced nature of difference.
The problem of mathematics is more than the stammering of language, that is,
of fumbling through the list of "inter-" descriptors-intersection, interwoven,
interaction, intervening-to grasp the doings of race, class, and gender. The authors
quite rightly point out that verbiage about simultaneity is an after-the-fact discus-
sion that says next to nothing about the mechanisms that produce inequality.
Their essay, which documents structural and representational aspects of inequal-
ity, will I hope be taken as an argument for balance between what is currently seen
as interactional consequences and interactional productions. The former should not
be confused with the latter; consequences refers to outcomes and "effects," whereas
the former constitutes the latter.
Their discussion should not be read, as I fear it might, simply as a plea for a new
technology, ethnomethodological vision, for thinking about difference. Approaches

REPRINT REQUESTS: Dana Y Takagi, Stevenson College, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa
Cruz, CA 95064.

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 SYMPOSIUM 497

to difference must be distinguished from visions of difference

approach focuses on apprehending difference. Contrasting
jures up perspective, utopia, and even that category about which
ambivalent-science. West and Fenstermaker are offering us the l
ethnomethodolgical gains as a means for understanding the mech
difference. Their choice of terms, mechanisms, is both an appe
science metaphors about society. Mechanisms that are not mech
situated conduct, interactional accomplishments, and contextually
tions.
What is engaging about this essay for me as a sociologist is their move to divide
scholarship about difference into metaphors and mechanisms. West and Fenster-
maker's notion of mechanisms is not completely at odds with some feminist
thinking about difference. Their compelling argument to decenter math metaphors
and privilege "situated conduct" is mostly complementary with Haraway's (1991)
exposition of situated knowledges and partial perspective, but, whereas Haraway's
project is to reclaim and rearticulate notions of science and objectivity for feminist
perspectives, West and Fenstermaker appear less sanguine about such a possibility.
If they are not keen on math metaphors, then what should we do about the fact
that the rest of the world steeps in the language of math, science, and biology? Or
put another way, academics are not the only ones who embrace the metaphors of
additivity and other mathematical relations. Discourses of science and math, and
of instrumental reason, characterize popular understandings of inequality too.
If interactional accomplishments are mechanisms of doing difference, then
perhaps the language of mathematics is part of that accomplishment as well.

REFERENCES

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and th
partial perspective. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature, edit
Haraway. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Pres
West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society 9

Dana Y Takagi is the author of The Retreat from Race (Rutgers University Press
various essays on race relations, Asian Americans, social problems, affirmative
identity politics. She is the kind of constructionist who believes in the existence off

BARRIE THORNE

University of Southern California

West and Fenstermaker's perceptive discussion of metaphors led me to re

upon the authors' own imagery for conceptualizing relations among gender

REPRINT REQUESTS: Barrie Thorne, Department of Sociology, University of Southern Cal

Los Angeles, CA 90089-2539.

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498 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

and class. Instead of mathematics, West and Fenstermaker evoke the sphere of
serious effort or work: "doing gender" (race, class); "difference as a routine,
methodical, and ongoing accomplishment"; "the local management of conduct in
relation to normative conceptions"; race, class, gender as "mechanisms for produc-
ing social inequality" (West and Fenstermaker 1995, 9).
This imagery of daily interaction as a process of production focuses the argument
that basic categories of difference and inequality are socially constructed. "Doing
gender" is a compelling concept because it jolts the assumption of gender as an
innate condition and replaces it with a sense of ongoing process and activity. The
process, according to West and Fenstermaker, starts with "normative conceptions,"
such as "the moral conviction that there are only two sexes" and related assumptions
about the "nature" of women and of men. Actors sustain these conceptions through
the practice of holding one another accountable as men or women (or Black men
or working-class white women). West and Fenstermaker argue that the work of
"doing difference"-the repeated act of holding one another accountable to cultural
conceptions-is the basic mechanism that connects gender, race, and class.
The upholding of cultural conceptions keeps categories in place, and, turning to
the dynamics of racial formation, West and Fenstermaker's framework can help
account for the creation and inhabiting of racial categories, but it cannot explain
the ways in which racial categories are "transformed and destroyed" (Omi and
Winant 1994, 55). Nor does the ethnomethodological approach grapple with
historical changes in the organization, meanings, and relationships among gender,
race, and class. West and Fenstermaker, like Garfinkel and Goffman, analyze social
phenomena with a functionalist tilt, emphasizing the maintenance and reproduction
of normative conceptions, but neglecting countervailing processes of resistance,
challenge, conflict, and change.
Other contemporary theorists image the construction of gender not as work but
as performance and even as parody. Pursuing an insight similar to the one that
propels West and Fenstermaker's thinking, the philosopher Judith Butler (1990)
writes: "Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes
nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the
various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would
be no gender at all" (p. 140). Butler writes within the tradition of poststructuralism
and seems to be unaware of sociological analyses of the construction of gender,
which predated her work by more than a decade (Epstein 1994). Like West and
Fenstermaker, but with a central emphasis on the heterosexual marking of gender,
Butler discusses the routine acts that sustain binary gender categories. Unlike West
and Fenstermaker, however, Butler emphasizes possibilities for transgression,
looking for ways to "trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy
and compulsory heterosexuality" (Butler 1990, x).
The dramaturgical approach that feminist sociologists left behind when we
discarded the conception of "sex roles" has reappeared in Butler's writings and in
the humanities and queer theory more generally. Dramaturgical metaphors seem to
fare better in their hands, perhaps because of a shift from reified noun ("role") to
verb ("perform") and a cascade of evocative images-masquerade, parody, gender

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 SYMPOSIUM 499

as a fabrication and a persistent impersonation that passes as t

an engaging counterpoint to the more earnest sociological appr
But gender extends beyond daily cultural performance, and i
more than doing drag and mocking naturalized conception
Gender--and race, class, and compulsory heterosexuality-exte
unconscious and the shaping of emotions (note the cognitive
difference" framework) and outward into social structure and
R. W. Connell (1987), who writes about a "field of gender relatio
scope and insists on a theoretical approach that opens toward histo
on structure and practice and on the organization of gender rela
as a going but contested concern give dynamism to the core arg
is a social construction. He and his colleagues (Kessler et al. 19
of suggestive metaphors when they write that class and gende
amplify, twist, negate, dampen, complicate each other" (p. 42).
relations among gender, race, class, and sexuality, we need a ra
and theories honed in many sites of analysis. By itself, th
difference" won't stretch far enough.

REFERENCES

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New Yor
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Epstein, Steven. 1994. A queer encounter: Sociology and the study of sexuality. Socio
12:188-202.

Kessler, Sandra, Dean J. Ashenden, R. W. Connell, and Gary W. Dowsett. 1985. Gender relations in
secondary schooling. Sociology of Education 58:34-48.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant, 1994. Racialformation in the United States: From the 1960s to the
1990s, 2d ed. New York: Routledge.
West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society 9:8-37.

Barrie Thorne is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Southern
California. She is the author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School and co-editor of
Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions and Language, Gender, and Society.

LYNN WEBER
University of Delaware

West and Fenstermaker build an analysis of race, class, and gender from th
following foundation: a critique of the metaphors in the emerging scholarship o

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wish to thank Margaret Andersen, Maxine Baca Zinn, Harry Brod, Sarah Jan
Brubaker, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and all the members of my graduate seminar on Race, Class, and
Gender at the University of Delaware for their helpful insights and critiques of this work.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Lynn Weber, Department of Sociology, University of Delaware, Newark,

19716.

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500 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

race, class, and gender; a critique of gender scholarship that ignores race and class;
and an ethnomethodological approach, which is not grounded in gender, race, or
class analysis. These three building blocks contain the strengths and the weaknesses
of their perspective.
Grounded in ethnomethodology, West and Fenstermaker conceptualize race,
class, and gender as emergent properties of social situations not reducible to a
material or biological essence, and therefore not properties of individuals or some
"vaguely defined set of role expectations" (p. 25). They highlight the simultaneity
of experience of race, class, and gender by focusing on how they emerge in
face-to-face interactions. These are the greatest strengths of their approach: that
race, class, and gender are socially constructed simultaneously in interaction and
are not reducible to biological or material characteristics of individuals.
Metaphors aside, the fundamental contrast between race, class, and gender
scholarship and "doing difference" is that West and Fenstermaker obscure rather
than illuminate the mechanisms of power in the production and mainte-
nance of racism, classism, and sexism. For race, class, and gender scholarship,
social relations of dominance/control and subordination/ resistance are the
cornerstones of theory. Because of its exclusive attention on face-to-face interac-
tion, macro social structural processes such as institutional arrangements, commu-
nity structures, and even family systems are rendered invisible in most observations
based on an ethnomethodological analysis. This has several consequences. First, it
obscures the freedom from constraints and the access to material resources that
frame privileged group members' face-to-face interactions with each other and the
control they exert in interactions with oppressed group members. In this way, it
subtly reproduces the bias in perspectives that emanate solely from positions of
privilege. Second, it conceals the collective involvement, connection, and con-
sciousness of oppressed group members that arise in the struggle for survival within
the context of systemic constraints.
A central element of privilege and power is freedom from constraints on
material, political, and ideological resources, options, and opportunities. When
options are not restricted, face-to-face encounters can take on greater significance
in the lives of the participants. For example, in our study of Black and white
professional-managerial women, Elizabeth Higginbotham and I asked women to
describe any differential treatment or discrimination they experienced at work.
Women in female-dominated occupations (teachers, nurses, librarians) talked in
detail about structural discrimination against the entire occupation-low wages,
lack of respect, and so on. Women in male-dominated occupations (lawyers,
professors, business managers) instead talked about face-to-face interactions in
the workplace, such as sexist and racist comments, being left out of key work
informational networks, and having bosses who did not appreciate their talents.
Wages, which were significantly different across these groups, were rarely men-
tioned by the women in male-dominated occupations. Instead they focused on
individual, everyday, face-to-face relationships both to define their problems and
to think about solutions (e.g., switch offices, change the way they interacted, and
so on). Without attention to macro social structures that enable privilege in

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 SYMPOSIUM 501

ideological and political as well as material/economic domains

less about the processes that are unspoken or not problematic i
interactions.
From the perspective of subordinate groups, failing to analyz
structures and community ties has the effect of producing a st
conformity and not a dynamic theory capable of revealing resi
change. Race, class, and gender are pervasive social arrangements
tal social structural changes in these arrangements cannot be full
attitudes and actions of a few unremarkable actors in everyday in
West and Fenstermaker analyze interactions involving dominant
group members, they can consequently see only the actions of
actors-whether conforming or resistant-as reinforcing the exis
and gender hierarchy.
Recall the example of the African American man who was stop
West and Fenstermaker argue that if he acts passively and accepts t
question, the race, class, and gender hierarchy is reinforced. If he
however, he brings on greater sanctions, and reinforces the ideol
Black men that got him stopped in the first place. In that situa
possibility for social change because the forces that could change
behaviors are not always represented in isolated one-on-one intera
Black driver encountered in that situation was more than a set o
expectations in another individual's head. He encountered a cop w
is legitimately authorized to use by his position in a macro poli
preserves the privilege of those in power through the use of for
as currently conceived, ignores both the material realities in the s
and the macro structures that lend force to the police action.
It also hides the connections of African Americans to a communit
because in this situation we can see the driver as having no opt
assume that he is isolated from others-the tendency when face-to
is the sole focus of attention. Imagine, instead, that the driver is
Rosa Parks, and he is sent down that highway as bait by a consor
American civil rights organizations, some of whose representative
planted with video cams to document unfair police treatment of A
men on the highways. When stopped, the driver might protest a
treatment, which does not reinforce the status quo, but rather galv
American community to demand that the officer be fired, the po
for selective enforcement of traffic laws and citizen abuse, the
recalled, and so on. This scenario can only happen when we recog
tion between an individual's collective consciousness, collective action, and
macro social structural change.
Besides taking a different stance with respect to power and macro social
structures, West and Fenstermaker argue that the mathematical metaphors com-
monly used in scholarship on race, class, and gender are inadequate and in some
ways inaccurate. As West and Fenstermaker note, all of these metaphors imply that
race, class, and gender can be isolated from one another in people's lives, a

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502 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

contention that is fairly uniformly rejected by the same authors who employ them
(cf. Andersen and Collins 1994; BacaZinn and Dill 1994; Collins 1990). They also
point out that authors sometimes reduce gender, race, or class to a material or
biological essence even while asserting that each is socially constructed, as when
Collins (1990, 27) suggests that social constructions of gender are based on clearer
biological criteria than constructions of race are. By articulating biology as a
difference among the dimensions, Collins undercuts the argument that they
are socially constructed.
While West and Fenstermaker correctly note the limits of the mathematical
metaphors, I think they incorrectly assume that the insights of a race, class, and
gender perspective have been seriously restricted by the use of less than perfect
metaphors. For example, mathematical metaphors have the most direct relevance
to positivist, quantitative research where race, class, and gender are treated as
variables in an equation allowed to represent social reality. None of the authors
cited here employ that approach and, in fact, are critical of it; furthermore, these
authors not only use mathematical metaphors but also many others. Literary images
are also quite common: the wall at the end of Brewster Place (Baca Zinn and Dill
1994) or "holding back the ocean with a broom" (Gilkes 1980). The fact that these
images do not fully depict the complexities of race, class, and gender in social
structural arrangements and lived experience does not inhibit these authors from
attempting to do so in the totality of their writing on the subject. In fact, West and
Fenstermaker themselves offer no metaphor to illustrate their perspective; instead,
they describe the accomplishment of race, class, and gender in social interaction-
which is not a metaphor/representation of the thing, but the thing itself-as they
see it. They would probably be very hard-pressed to find some other image that
would accurately stand for the processes they attempt to describe.
West and Fenstermaker contend that we must analyze gender, race, and class in
the context in which it is accomplished, and that is precisely what race, class, and
gender scholarship does-presents systematic observations of the lives of people of
color, women, and the working class. By developing a "doing difference" approach
from a critique of race, class, and gender metaphors and ethnomethodology-
instead of the systematic observations they call for-they obscure the central
dynamics of power relations in the micro and macro structures of oppression.

REFERENCES

Andersen, Margaret, and Patricia Hill Collins. 1994. Race, class, and gender: An ant
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Baca Zinn, Maxine, and Bonnie Thorton Dill. 1994. Women of color in U.S. society
Temple University Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and
empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Gilkes, Cheryl. 1980. "Holding back the ocean with a broom": Black women and commu
The Black woman, edited by La Francis Rodgers-Rose, pp. 217-31. Beverly Hills, C
West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society 9:8-

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 SYMPOSIUM 503

Lynn Weber is on leave as Director of the Center for Research on Women at t

Memphis, spending the 1994-96 academic years as Distinguished Visiting G
Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Delaware. Her w
race, class, and gender in the social mobility process and in college and univer
transformation. She is co-author ofThe American Perception of Class (Temple U
1987) and "Moving Up with Kin and Community: Upward Social Mobilityfbr B
Women," published in Gender & Society.

HOWARD WINANT
Temple University

Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker (1995) do some marvelous work in their
article "Doing Difference." They give us a thoughtful account of the dynamics of
gender-, race-, and class-based forms of "difference," which is to say of th
dynamics of social inequality and injustice. They also employ ethnomethodology
in a creative fashion, producing a wide range of political insights and helping us t
reconceptualize some very thorny problems in contemporary U.S. politics.
Their principal achievement is their extension of the ethnomethodological
account of difference, almost up to the frontier of a hegemony-oriented analysis
Their account of gender, race, and class as accomplishments, projects from which
human agency is never absent, helps explain better than any other approach I know
the contradictory character of these dimensions of identity.
By "contradictory character" I mean what Du Bois described nearly a century
ago as the "veil" that divided and complicated blackness, the "peculiar sensation
of being "both an American and a Negro." Although he spoke of a racial distinction
his analysis resonates with oppressions of various kinds. "One ever feels his [sic
twoness," Du Bois wrote (Du Bois [1903] 1989, 5). Awareness of the distinctive
character of Black identity in a white society did not permit any transcendence o
the veil, but it did facilitate a survival strategy: one had to divide oneself, to see
oneself from both within and without, in order to anticipate and thus withstand the
degradation that white supremacy constantly heaped upon its "others."
The contradiction is that to render this survival strategy effective, one has to
emulate the oppressor, to think like him, to become him, at least up to a certain
point. The Du Boisian analysis explains the "internalized oppression" much de-
nounced by nationalists; more to the point here, it also explains the reproduction
of racism as a price of surviving, and of resisting, racism. There are many
implications one could draw from such an analysis: Freudian, Marxian, and
Foucaultian approaches could all develop further the rich account Du Bois offers.
So too can ethnomethodology, in the capable hands of West and Fenstermaker.
What I think is most useful about their work is its ability to stretch th
ethnomethodological approach politically. Since Garfinkel, ethnomethodology has

REPRINT REQUESTS: Howard Winant, Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphi

PA 19122.

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504 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

understood social relationships in terms of an "experiential technology," a set of

tools available to actors to make sense of their interpersonal relations, their
"lifeworld" in the Schutzian phrase. I do not think I am exaggerating when I suggest
that West and Fenstermaker burst these bounds.
Take this statement:

While individuals are the ones who do gender, the process of rendering something
accountable is both interactional and institutional in character: It is a feature of social
relationships, and its idiom derives from the institutional arena in which those
relationships come to life. (p. 21)

Or this, immediately following:

Gender is obviously much more than a role or an individual characteristic: it is a

mechanism whereby situated social action contributes to the reproduction of social
structure. (p. 21)

This is what I mean by reaching the frontiers of a hegemony-based analysis. As

I understand them, West and Fenstermaker argue that there is something gener-
alizable about the production of difference in regular, situated, human interaction.
The linguistic regularities (what they call "idiom") through which difference is
recognized and the patterned repetition (what they call "mechanism") through
which individual characteristics become collectivized produce the divided and
unequal social whole. This is a real extension of the traditional ethnomethodologi-
cal perspective, whose focus was restricted to the generation and confirmation
of shared perceptions of interaction. Only if this expanded view of the production
of social structure is in place, I suggest, can we begin to talk of the politics of
difference.
Yet, is it fully in place? I have spoken of the "frontiers" of a hegemony-
based analysis because I think some significant problems persist in West and
Fenstermaker's approach. Their account of the institutional dimensions of differ-
ence, of the social structures we label gender, race, and class, remains limited. For
them, structure is only that which can be shown to be constantly reproduced from
moment to moment. It has no ongoing, relatively independent existence.
An important dimension of hegemony is therefore neglected in the ethnometho-
dological view of difference as situated conduct. In my view, social structure must
be understood as dynamic and reciprocal; it is not only a product of accreted and
repeated subjective action but also produces subjects. As an example, consider the
commodity form of value. Without necessarily embracing the entire Marxist
schema, we can readily see that capitalist classes and their members (as well as
most of the other relationships and, consequently, the social roles we take for
granted in the postmodern world) would be inconceivable without this structure;
yet, it would be difficult to argue that the commodity form exists solely in the ways
in which it is presently reproduced. On the contrary, it has a formidable inertia, a
historical weight, which is crystallized in innumerable institutions, customs, and
laws. It has been engraved in time and space, made into a truly "deep structure"-a
result not only of contemporary repetitions but also as a legacy of past labor and

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 SYMPOSIUM 505

past action (Sewell 1992, 25-6). It can produce subjects only becau
its weight, its ubiquity, over epochal stretches of time.
To understand difference in terms of hegemony, then, we must
as situated conduct that repeats and thus supports systems of p
consequence of a pre-existing "structure in dominance" (Ha
hegemony is the synthesis of these two "moments" of power: Re
limited and situated agency of its subjects, it also concedes to th
real, autonomy. This is a situation that Gramsci described as one
which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to
(Gramsci 1971, 182).
This leads me to my final point concerning social change. To th
as I have done so far-as situated conduct plus institutionally
omy-remains inadequate because neither of these accounts
disruptive, oppositional character of difference. It is striking ho
nomethodological and hegemony-based approaches to gender, rac
that these social distinctions are relatively static features of domina
ity. Whether routinized through "experiential technology" or co
fashion by the powerful, the agency that "does" difference is con
and collusive in its own subordination.
Looking at racial difference, for instance: If race consists of "situated conduct"
through which actual human subjects necessarily reproduce their subordination,
how can large-scale sociopolitical change ever occur on racial lines? How was Dr.
King able, to pick just one example from a virtually infinite list, to mobilize 6,000
black children(!) to march against the dogs, fire hoses, and truncheons of the
Birmingham police one day in 1963? Weren't those children, and their parents, as
"situated" as everyone else?
On the other hand, if "structures in dominance" are able to maintain hegemony
by judicious concessions of autonomy to the subordinate, how is it that concepts
of emancipation, liberation, and freedom have proved so hard to eradicate? The
various dimensions of difference-gender-, racial-, and class-based, as well as
others-retain an oppositional character that always exceeds the grasp of ges-
tures made to contain it. Even the elimination of inequality (utopian as that
might sound at this reactionary political juncture) would not justify the liquidation
of difference. The project of self-emancipation, what Du Bois called "the conser-
vation of races," would still await realization. (Once more, I am speaking in the
context of racial difference, but I think the insight has wider application.) This work
is already visible, prefigured in those aspects of "situated conduct" that do not
preserve, but rather subvert, the established "experiential technology" of acquies-
cence to subordination (Kelley 1994), as well as in counterinstitutions and coun-
tercultures of various sorts.
In this respect, difference is not something that one (or many) "do," but rather
something that one "is" and many "are." The permanence of difference, situated
and structured, but above all oppositional, still points toward freedom.

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506 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1995

REFERENCES

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 1989. The souls of Blackfolk. New York: Penguin.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare
Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance. In Sociological theories:
Race and colonialism. Paris: UNESCO.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 1994. Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the Black working class. New York: Free
Press.

Sewell, William H., Jr. 1992. A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation. American
Journal of Sociology 98 (July):1-29.
West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society 9:8-37.

Howard Winant teaches sociology and Latin American Studies at Temple University in Phila-
delphia. He is the co-author (with Michael Omi) of Racial Formation in the United States: From
the 1960s to the 1990s (2d ed., Routledge, 1994); he has also written Racial Conditions: Politics,
Theory, Comparisons (University of Minnesota Press, 1994) and Stalemate: Political Economic
Origins of Supply-Side Policy (Praeger, 1988).

REPLY
(Re)Doing Difference

CANDACE WEST
University of California, Santa Cruz
SARAH FENSTERMAKER
University of California, Santa Barbara

We are honored to have "Doing Difference" as the subject of this symposium

is extremely gratifying to have our article read so seriously by Professors Col
Maldonado, Takagi, Thorne, Weber, and Winant, and to have this opportunity
respond to their remarks. Together, they raise three important concerns to w
our reply will be focused. In the space allotted to us, we try to re-articulate
fundamental distinction between process and outcome so crucial to understan
our perspective and then reassess the implications of this distinction for th
questions of (a) face-to-face interaction versus structural discrimination; (b) h
tory, institutions, and social structure; and (c) opposition, resistance, and chan

AUTHORS' NOTES: For their critical comments and suggestions on these ideas, we thank Be
Aptheker, Valerie Jenness, and Don H. Zimmerman.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Candace West, Sociology Board, Stevenson College, University of Califo
Santa Cruz, CA 95064.

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